News from the Research Administration and Compliance Office at the University of California, Berkeley

February 26, 2013

Federal Public Access Policy Expanding

On February 22, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) announced a new policy to expand the federal public access policy.

OSTP Director John Holdren has “directed Federal agencies with more than $100M in R&D expenditures to develop plans to make the published results of federally funded research freely available to the public within one year of publication and requiring researchers to better account for and manage the digital data resulting from federally funded scientific research.” Each agency will have six months to submit a draft plan to OSTP.

The National Institutes of Health has had a public access policy in place since 2008. Direct Holdren stated, “while this new policy call does not insist that every agency copy the NIH approach exactly, it does ensure that similar policies will appear across government.”

The National Science Foundation issued a same-day response to the new policy, stating that NSF and other federal partners have a “commitment to expand public access to the results of its funded research” and that “NSF has already laid out a tentative timeline for consultation, planning, systems development, and changes to its policies, which will be fine-tuned over the coming months.”